Julian G. Waller
The political regime that Russian President Vladimir Putin helms today is not the same as the one he started a war with in 2022. Russia has been an authoritarian country for years, with national elections heavily weighted in favor of Putin’s party and the ruling elite connected through long-standing patron-client networks. But since the invasion of Ukraine, Russia has turned into a true personalist dictatorship, with unchecked power in the hands of one man—Putin—and the rest of the country’s political institutions relegated to subordinate positions in the authoritarian hierarchy.
The German political theorist Carl Schmitt defined a sovereign ruler as “he who decides the exception,” a description well suited to Putin’s extraordinary wartime authority. As the war enters its third year, Putin’s regime is more closed than ever before, with elections largely functioning as displays of loyalty and a restrictive system of coercion and censorship maintaining social order. Institutions that even just nominally remain connected to the Russian electorate, such as the parliament or gubernatorial offices, have been pushed aside in favor of security agencies or elite, unelected council bodies, such as the Security Council, that serve Putin’s administration as an ersatz tsar’s court.
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